| palawa kani | |
|---|---|
| Created by | Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre |
| Date | 1992[1] |
| Setting and usage | Tasmania |
| Ethnicity | Aboriginal Tasmanians |
| Users | 251-500 (2018)[2] |
| Purpose | |
| Latin alphabet[3] | |
| Sources | Oral tradition and fragments from the 8 to 16Tasmanian languages recorded by early Europeans.[1][4] |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (qpa unofficial[5]) |
| Glottolog | pala1356 |
| AIATSIS[2] | T16 |
| ELP | Palawa Kani |
| IETF | art-x-palawa (unofficial)[5] |
Palawa kani is aconstructed language[1] created by theTasmanian Aboriginal Centre as a compositeTasmanian language, based on reconstructed vocabulary from the limited accounts of the various languages once spoken by theAboriginal people of what is nowTasmania (palawa kani:Lutruwita).[2][6][4][7]
The centre wishes to restrict the availability of the language until it is established in the Aboriginal Tasmanian community and claimscopyright.[8] TheUnited Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is used to support this claim to copyright as it declares that indigenous people have the right to control their "cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions" and that states must "recognise and protect the exercise of these rights".[9][10] However, the declaration is legally non-binding and languages cannot receive copyright protection in many countries, including Australia and the United States.[11][12][8] The centre however provides a list of place names in palawa kani and consents to their free use by the public.[13] Dictionaries and other copyrightable resources for learning the language are only provided to theAboriginal community.[14]
TheTasmanian languages were exterminated after theBritish colonisation of Tasmania and theBlack War. The last native speaker of any of the languages,Fanny Cochrane Smith, died in 1905.[15]
In 1972,Robert M. W. Dixon andTerry Crowley investigated reconstructing the Tasmanian languages from existing records, in a project funded by theAustralian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. This included interviewing two granddaughters of Fanny Cochrane Smith, who provided "five words, one sentence, and a short song". They were able to find "virtually no data on the grammar and norunning texts" and stated "it is impossible to say very much of linguistic interest about the Tasmanian languages", and they did not proceed with the project.[16]
In the late twentieth century, as part of community efforts to retrieve as much of the original Tasmanian culture as possible, theTasmanian Aboriginal Centre attempted to reconstruct a language for the indigenous community. Due to the scarcity of records, palawa kani was constructed as a composite of several of the estimated dozen original Tasmanian languages.[2]
The two primary sources of lexical and linguistic material are Brian Plomley's 1976 word lists and Crowley and Dixon's 1981 chapter on Tasmanian. These are supplemented by archival research. The source languages are those of theNortheastern Tasmanian andEastern Tasmanian language families, as these are ancestral to the modern palawa population as well as being the best attested Tasmanian languages. However, most place names are reconstructed using languages spoken around the locality as sources. Usually a single Tasmanian word is chosen for an English concept, but occasional duplicates occur, such aspalawa andpakana, which come from different languages and both mean (Tasmanian) person.[1]
The words need to be reconstructed from the Englishpronunciation spellings that they were recorded in. For example, in 1830 the local name forHobart was recorded asnib.ber.loon.ne andniberlooner. Allowing for the distortions that occurred when linguistically untrained Europeans tried recording Tasmanian words, the centre reconstructs the name asnipaluna.[7]
Palawa kani was developed in the 1990s by the language program of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe.[7] The centre wishes to maintain control over the language until the Aboriginal community is familiar and competent with it.[8]
The language is only taught by community organisations and not by state schools. Since the language was constructed, an increasing number of people are able to use the language to some extent, some to great fluency.[17] However, the centre requests that non-Aboriginals wanting to use the language first make a formal application to the centre.[13] The centre rejects the classification of a "constructed language" for palawa kani. In 2012, the centre filed a request to remove the Wikipedia articles on this language on copyright grounds. However, this was refused.[8][18]
The animated television seriesLittle J & Big Cuz was the first television show to feature an episode entirely in palawa kani, which was broadcast on theNITV network in 2017.[19] In 2018,The Nightingale became the first major film to feature palawa kani, with consultation from Aboriginal Tasmanian leaders.[20] Palawa kani is also used on a number of signs inprotected areas of Tasmania, for examplekunanyi has been gazetted as an official name forMount Wellington,[21][22] and what was formerly known as Asbestos Range National Park is now known asNarawntapu National Park.[23]
Palawa kani has been formally legitimated through the Tasmanian governmentalAboriginal and Dual Naming Policy of 2013, which "allows for an Aboriginal and an introduced name to be used together as the official name and for new landmarks to be named according to their Aboriginal heritage".[1] These includekanamaluka / Tamar River andkunanyi / Mount Wellington.[24] Where no historical recorded name can be found, the policy allows for newly created names to be recognised as official.[25] A number of other palawa kani place names exist, but are not in official use.[26]
At the end of 2024 the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) requested the Tasmanian government change thirteen gazetted Aboriginal place names written in the reconstructed palawa kani language, with the change being having the first letter changed from lower-case to upper-case.[27] A palawa kani language coordinator said this was a result of the evolution of the use of the language in the community with most Aboriginal people now using this format, and the lower-case to upper-case change mirrored changes in some mainland Aboriginal languages.[27] Some of the thirteen Aboriginal place names were Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Takayna/Tarkine, Yingina/Great Lake and Truwana/Cape Barren Island.[27] The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) website states that 'initial capital letters for place names are now standard practice' and their interactive map has over 200 places names with an upper-case first letter.[27][28] The Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania also has changed the 44 Aboriginal and dual names as having an upper-case first letter.[27][29]
In the following table, theIPA is first listed. The orthography is listed in italics if it differs from the IPA.
The vowels are/a/,/i/,/u/ and the diphthongs /ei/⟨ay⟩ and /oi/⟨uy⟩.
| Labial | Coronal | Velar | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | dental | plain | palatalized | palatalized | plain | ||
| Stop | p | t̪⟨th⟩ | t | tʲ⟨tj⟩ | k | ||
| Nasal | m | n | nʲ⟨ny⟩ | ŋ⟨ng⟩ | |||
| Sonorant | median | w | r/ɹ⟨rr/r⟩ | j⟨y⟩ | |||
| lateral | l | lʲ⟨ly⟩ | |||||
Consonant clusters includepr,tr andkr.
Like most mainland languages, Tasmanian languages lackedsibilants (which is apparent in the aboriginal pronunciation of English words likesugar, where the 's' was replaced with at inpidgin English), and this is reflected in palawa kani.
The pronunciation of palawa kani may reflect those words preserved in the now English-speaking palawa community, but does not reflect how the original Tasmanian words were likely to have been pronounced. Taylor (2006) states that "the persons who contributed to the project would appear to have uncritically accepted phonological features of the Australian Mainland languages as a guide to palawa phonology without undertaking an adequate comparative analysis of the orthographies used by the European recorders", and gives three examples:[30]
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has decided that palawa kani shouldonly be written in lowercase letters.[31] Initial capital letters may be used for names of places and people and "family/Ancestral collectives".[27][28][29][32]
Nouns do not have number, and verbs do not indicate person or tense, e.g.waranta takara milaythina nara takara 'we walk where (place) they walked'.
In the early stages of thepalawa kani project, it was assumed that virtually no grammatical information had been preserved from the original Tasmanian languages, and thatpalawa kani would have to draw heavily on grammatical features of English. Since then, more thorough analysis by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre of words and sentences collected in wordlists of the Tasmanian languages have provided evidence of word orders differing from English, loanwords, adaptation of words to talk about introduced concepts, and suffixes. These grammatical and vocabulary features have been incorporated intopalawa kani.[6]
The onlyrunning text recorded for the original Tasmanian languages is a sermon preached byGeorge Robinson on Bruny Island in 1829, after being on the island for only eight weeks. His "Tasmanian" was actually English replaced word-for-word with Tasmanian words that had been stripped of their grammar, much as occurs in a contactpidgin. Robinson is one of the principal primary sources for palawa kani.[33]
There are two sets of pronouns,[26]
| sg | pl | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | mina | waranta |
| 2 | nina | nina-mapali |
| 3 | nara | nara-mapali |
The second- and third-person plural pronouns are formed by addingmapali ("many") to the respective singular pronouns; no second- or third-person plural pronouns are attested in the known documentation of the original Tasmanian languages.
| sg | pl | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | mana | mana |
| 2 | nanya | |
| 3 | nika |
mapali 'many' may be used to distinguishmana 'my' frommana-mapali 'our, your'.
nika also means 'this', as inmilaythina nika 'their lands / this land'.
The numerals are,[26]
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pama | paya | luwa | wulya | mara | nana | tura | pula | tali | kati |
These are conjoined forpamakati 11,payakati 12, etc.
For tens, -ka is added to the digit, forpayaka 20,luwaka 30, etc. For the hundreds and thousands, -ki and -ku are added, forpamaki 100,maraki 500,pamaku 1000,taliku 9000, etc.
 | This sectionis missing information aboutinterlinear gloss, if at all possible. Please expand the section to include this information. Further details may exist on thetalk page.(October 2021) |
This sample is a eulogy by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Language Program first used at the 2004 anniversary of theRisdon Cove massacre of 1804.[34]
| ya pulingina milaythina mana-mapali-tu | Greetings to all of you here on our land |
| mumirimina laykara milaythina mulaka tara | It was here that the Mumirima people[a] hunted kangaroo all over their lands |
| raytji mulaka mumirimina | It was here that the white men[b] hunted the Mumirimina |
| mumirimina-mapali krakapaka laykara | Many Mumirimina died as they ran |
| krakapaka milaythina nika-ta | Died here on their lands |
| waranta takara milaythina nara takara | We walk where they once walked |
| waranta putiya nayri | And their absence saddens us |
| nara laymi krakapaka waranta-tu manta waranta tunapri nara. | But they will never be dead for us as long as we remember them. |
Other versions are available,[35] including one with a sound recording.[36]
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions ... including ... oral traditions [and] literatures... They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. 2. In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights.
Generally, there is no copyright in languages unless they are expressed in material form, being either written or recorded. Even then, the copyright protects the expression and not the underlying language. This can be an issue for Indigenous peoples and language centres as their language is oral, in that it is passed down through generations.
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